Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @05:51PM
from the i-hear-what-you're-doing-there dept.

supersloshy writes "VideoLAN, makers of the well-known media player VLC, have just announced a new project called libaacs. The libaacs library's intention is to provide a free software library to implement the AACS specification, the copy-protection found on things such as Blu-ray discs. Note that this isn't meant to actually be a decoding library. It includes no AACS keys and is solely developed for research purposes."

I'd like to see how such a cease-and-desist notice might be worded. From the summary: "It includes no AACS keys". From the article: "this project doesn't offer any key or certificate that could be used to decode encrypted copyrighted material." So without the player keys, it's not a complete circumvention device but instead an encryption research project, exempt under 17 USC 1201(g) [copyright.gov]. And even if it did have keys, the interoperability exemption in 1201(f) combined with the fair use exemption that the Register of Copyrights recently enacted for three years might save it.

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It isn't supposed to protect someone from bad legal advice, it's supposed to protect them from unqualified individuals passing themselves off as a lawyer.

There is a difference between advice on a law and legal advice, The state doesn't really care if you are both a moron and a lawyer as long as you can pass the bar and do not take too much of the courts time up when being an idiot, They do care if you pretend to be someone's lawyer. And this is pretty much true for about any country or political subdivision

I don't know about laws elsewhere, but United States allows the fair use of a trademark [wikipedia.org] to claim that product A is compatible with product B or that product A may better serve a customer's needs than product B. Specifically, a trademark may not be used as an ersatz copyright or patent (Sega v. Accolade; Dastar v. Fox).

Hey, that law of yours that I think is supposed to protect your population from bad legal advice, how did it work out for you now that we have internet?

You can assume that nothing you read on the Internet is "legal advice" as the law defines it, except perhaps an e-mail digitally signed by your attorney. Instead, it's "legal information". Wik [wikipedia.org]

And the EFF has some bad-ass lawyers. I know one EFF lawyer, who spoke to a local group here in Chicago back in the Spring, who's been offered jobs by two industry groups. I guess they figured they'd rather be paying him a salary than facing him in court. He was an interesting guy. He'd made some dough doing mergers or something before joining the EFF and didn't seem to be phased by the dangling carrot. He was also an extremely persuasive speaker. I could understand why someone like the RIAA wouldn't want to meet him in front of a judge.

You seem to have forgotten about the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the concept of a "circumvention device". That was what they chased after everybody who distributed DeCSS for. Of course, it was totally futile then as it is now, but there is a legal stick to shake at people for this sort of thing, at least in the US.

actually i'm getting to like the DCMA, it's a lot more of a double edged sword than the people who were lobbying for it thought. sure, you get a take down notice and you're boned if you're not rich and right and don't take it down immediately, however if you do take it down immediately 50 other people immediately put it back up and they have to go through the whole process again. gives the lawyers something to do too.

For one thing, France has its own counterpart to the DMCA [wikipedia.org]. For another, I am speculating on the right of United States residents, including the editors of Slashdot, to use VideoLAN products.

For another, I am speculating on the right of United States residents, including the editors of Slashdot, to use VideoLAN products.

Tangential riff: Anyone else notice CNN using videolan recently? It looked to me like they used it all the time for showing video of the oil spewing out of the well. They frequently had multiple videos running simultaneously, each in its own window and often there would be at least one 'dead' window with the trademark videolan traffic cone in it.

Actually he is talking about those videos that are often shown behind the speaker in their "war room" or whatever they call it and I have seen it too. I would guess it is because VideoLAN has that simple checkbox to loop videos indefinitely and the fact it'll play nearly any format, so it is easy for them to take several videos fresh from viewers and folks at the scene and loop them in the background.

As for TFA I wish them the best of luck and hope they enjoy their cease and desist. It is getting to the p

The exemptions the librarian of congress recently decreed don't apply. See 4(ii) in the research exemption: MPAA lobbied sufficiently to get it crippled to the point of uselessness. And the fair use exemption is only for DVDs. If you want to legally play a Bluray, nothing has changed.

players are LICENSED. money.While i'm sure the money is nice gravy I don't think it's the only reason and probablly not even the main reason for keeping things tightly gaurded.

Open source and open standards are fundamenally incompatible with drm since if you have the unobfuscated source to a player or even a sufficiant spec (including all required keys) needed to implement a player you can create a player that does not respect the drm.

but we still will be able to play our media. you have done nothing but st

The money is the ONLY reason. It must be, since the ones promoting this are corporations, and it isn't a benefit otherwise.

As to key revocation -- sure, why not? But, existing material can still be decoded. Of course, "official" players would then have to be updated to play new discs. Which gives a very bad "out-of-the-box" experience. Imagine you (accidentally) purchased a new disc, and an old-stock player. Take it home, and discover that your Blue-Ray won't play Blue-Ray.

As to key revocation -- sure, why not? But, existing material can still be decoded. Of course, "official" players would then have to be updated to play new discs. Which gives a very bad "out-of-the-box" experience. Imagine you (accidentally) purchased a new disc, and an old-stock player. Take it home, and discover that your Blue-Ray won't play Blue-Ray.

Until you attach it to the internet with an ethernet cable. Or give it an update on a USB stick, or order a special Blue-Ray from the manufacturer. Oops, you discover that your model is two years old, and no further updates are being done...

They just put updates for players directly on the new discs. No internet/usb/update disc necessary.

Revocation works, and has worked, because all the keys identified so far came from Windows software players, and it's deemed standard operating procedure to have to patch Windows software occasionally. If someone gets the AACS key out of a Sony BDP-S370 or whatever, we may see a very different result.

It would only be illegal to play a disc if the disc, not the player, had an attached license that you would be violating. Player licenses only means you can't sell or distribute a device that decodes it without one. If you were intrinsically capable of reading the disc with only the power of your MIND, player licenses wouldn't stop you. Of course, that would also make disc license infringement a little hard to detect.

That's not to say that they do or don't have licenses on every blu-ray disc, I don't kno

Freedom. Open source software generally makes it easy to connection functionality of different programs together. So once you have it decrypted, there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with it. Commercial software potentially makes all sorts of promises to the people they get the license from to not allow that.

If they had the power to take down BluRay decrypters, they'd be going after the commercial tools that actually work. This is roughly the umpteenth open source library announced and what they all have in common is that they don't work on any of the newer movies with MKBv11 or higher and/or anything more than the simplest forms of BD+ protection. It's unlikely open source will catch up until the MPAA gives up the DRM fight, you may not see it but there's still a constant war of updates to make the decrypters work on new discs.

Its not like people have stopped breaking these codecs. Eventually they will be broken. All of them. (...) They are doing it for the joy of cracking a puzzle. (...) The economics of constantly updating the rom in players can't match the cracking joy the kids get breaking into them.

You really don't get how modern DRM works, do you? They don't have to constantly update the ROM, they just reveal the functionality bit by bit with new discs and so there's an endless war to reverse engineer and update the decryption software. It's a war of attrition and they're winning, it's more puzzles than people are willing to work on just for shits and giggles. It literally takes manyears of dedicated work to continuously update the tool and open source is lagging more and more behind, not closing up.

AACS works by encrypting the disk's key with every allowed player key and placing the resultant block of encrypted keys on the disk.To decrypt a disk the player tries its own key on each encryption key in the block until it decrypts a key that can play the disk, or it runs out of keys to try.

To revoke a key they simply stop including a player's key in the batch of encryption keys in the block of keys.

This is fundamentally flawed because the decryption keys are on the disk / player

Thanks, but I know plenty. To get rid of AACS all you need is the MKB derived from the player key, but open source doesn't have that either. The other part of most BluRay disc protection is BD+ which works pretty much like I said. And now they're just starting to top it off with Cinavia too, an audio watermark that'll prevent decrypted copies from playing on hardware players. If you have a decrypted copy of The Losers (Region A) and a fully updated PS3, the sound will die after 20 minutes and a nasty messag

Or Europe, after the EUCD. And it won't be most other places either, after ACTA. But over time you realize the law isn't a perfect democratic tool but often run by special interest groups, and how little the law means if sufficiently many disagree with it.

largely thanks to a few good people that keep calling the bluff each time the legislation gets renamed and presented as something thats supposed to fix a new problem. Sadly, for each generation there are fewer thats willing to stick their neck out for those kinds of causes.

Since Sam Bulte [wikipedia.org]'s political career was destroyed due to her support for Bill C-60, only MPs in very safe ridings have been willing to take on the issue, and no government has risked letting a bill actually make its way to a vote.

The bills keep getting proposed to appease the Americans, but no government is going to have the balls to try to get them passed in the current minority climate.

What makes you think it's illegal to decode bluray disks in America? Just how do you watch your movies anyway?

This is a decoding library nothing more. It's useless without AACS keys. How you obtain those keys is your problem and the problem of the person who actually is in breach of the stupid American anti-circumvention laws.

Using this library is no more illegal than using a TV to convert 1s and 0s into pretty pictures.

While I appreciate Videolan's achievements, VLC's programmers should improve the interface in one key aspect that has boggled my mind for a while:

I would like to see video and audio controls on the active default interface. At the moment, if I am watching video and want to adjust contrast, saturation, brightness etc, I have to click an icon on the interface, then choose video controls which I first have to activate!

Too many steps for a simple thing in my opinion. With the present implementation, If one choo

VLC's programmers should improve the interface in one key aspect that has boggled my mind for a while:

Because most of the world cares about how the video player performs rather then how it looks. When I use VLC I want to press the play button and have the whole thing go away until I'm done. At this very moment VLC does just that.

I would like to see video and audio controls on the active default interface. At the moment, if I am watching video and want to adjust contrast, saturation, brightness etc

Shorten isn't all that obscure, although it's fallen out of favor. There was a time not too long ago when it was the most popular and widely known lossless audio codec. Of course, the market for a lossless audio codec was pretty small back then--most people, as now, were perfectly happy with MP3s, and few people had the bandwidth to download lossless files. And nowadays, SHN (or "Shorten") has been almost entirely supplanted by FLAC and lossless formats from Apple and MS. Nevertheless, it's hardly "litt

Depends on whether you consider the Grateful Dead or Phish or other similar bands to be something. Shorten (.shn) was the standard lossless audio format among the "taper-friendly-band" recording exchange community until FLAC came along, and it hasn't been fully supplanted in that community yet, though its use is dying.

I don't think it's generally *you* that has the software, but rather one's employer that runs it on their network. And I assume "pay to surf" would imply some sort of anonymization along with the paying? (Or, as likely, it's just categorized as a sort of site you just have no particular business visiting during work hours. Sort of like/. - no clue why that isn't blocked here.)

AnyDVD HD already does decrypt AACS and BD+ and it contains all the keys necessary to decrypt movies. So far Slysoft (makers of the tool) have kept themselves from being sued by being located in Antigua where clearly they have some kind of legal defence.

Traditionally that has also been the case for VLC which was based in France where software patents don't apply and decss appears semi legit. I don't think they have much to worry about (more than now) by inserting an AACS implementation. Where they might g